Goran Rosenberg - A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz

Some of the survivors see only the letters spelling jude and draw their own conclusions.

Some of them keep on being afraid even after they understand. I go through a plastic bag of small and somewhat dog-eared photos from your time in Alingsås. Many of them are group photos of young people cautiously pressing together, smiling into the camera, often with a glass in their hand, and a cigarette. Some are holding each other. Some are kissing. Some look a little distant. Most are under thirty, I would guess, though many look older. Most are dressed up, some are even elegant. You’re always elegantly dressed, I must say. Nice jackets, several of them, I note, a pale check in the summer pictures, usually with a wide bow tie, sometimes an ordinary tie; your shoes are polished, the cut of your trousers impeccable, your shirts well ironed. You care about your appearance, I can see that, and you’re eager for Haluś to like what she sees. Apart from anything else, you want her to see that you’re earning enough to dress “decently,” as you put it. “In the next day or two I’ll get a new photo taken and send it to you. I don’t look all that good in the last one. I’ve lost 6 kilos in Sweden, though I don’t really know why. We aren’t short of anything here, it’s like the good old days before the war.”

No, you aren’t short of anything, and you look very good despite those six kilos you’re worried about, not very tall, that’s true, but slim, with finely chiseled features. You’re rarely smiling in the pictures and your eyes often have a slightly absent look (posing is not your best sport), but no one seeing you at those parties and on those outings in and around Alingsås in the spring and summer of 1946 could possibly see anything other than a handsome young man with his life ahead of him. Especially not in the photos where you’re all posing on warm summer jetties and rocky shores and the sun is shining and the sea is glittering and for one captured instant you all look as if you’ve known one another for a long time and have belonged here for a long time and are only doing what young people with their lives ahead of them do.

But soon faces will disappear, and farewells be said, and names be forgotten, and what seemed like a lasting fellowship will turn out to have been a haphazard and brief encounter between people who just a while ago had never met, and who just a while ago couldn’t imagine a place like this, and who for a single captured instant have only one another to share the world with. I see you holding one another, touching one another, looking at one another as if you’ll never have to part again. But I also see that you’re clinging to one another, bearing one another up, convincing one another that the waiting will be over soon, and the connection soon established, and the journey on to somewhere else soon resumed. Sweden may look like paradise and for a while feel like paradise to the young people in the yellowing pictures of parties and outings in and around Alingsås, but most of them are dreaming impatiently of the next leg of the journey, including your brother, to judge by another yellowing document: “wishes to travel to Palestine” says the record of a police interrogation at Öreryd on August 22, 1945.

Perhaps you do too, before the dream of Haluś overtakes everything.

As late as September 1946, 45 percent of Jewish survivors in Sweden want to travel on to Palestine, 28 percent to the United States, 8 percent to other destinations. Only 16 percent want to be repatriated. Only 3 percent want to stay in Sweden.

Some 650 Jewish survivors, most of them young women, eventually tire of waiting for legal openings for the journey onward, and at the end of January 1947 they board a ship in the harbor of Trelleborg. The ship, the Ulua , is a Honduran-registered former American coast guard vessel weighing 880 metric tons. The passengers, who arrive on two specially chartered trains, are said to be between eighteen and thirty, mostly women. The voyage has been organized by the Jewish Refugee Welfare Association, whose representative in Trelleborg, Mr. Gunther Kohn, finds the Ulua in such a poor state that he wants a committee of passengers to approve conditions on board before departure. “A quick look at the ship’s facilities explains why Mr. Kohn is letting the passengers voice an opinion before they are crammed on board,” writes the local paper, Trelleborgs Allehanda . In any event, it’s “scarcely suitable for accommodating even 600 passengers for a number of days. The steerage has been fitted with a kind of cross between bunks and shelves, made of rough wood, on which the passengers are expected to sleep.”

The departure of the Ulua on January 24 makes the front page:

It was a singing ship that put out from the quayside in front of the Trelleborg harbormaster’s office at 3:30 in the afternoon — sailing toward an uncertain fate at the center of international politics. During the day, 661 Jewish emigrants had boarded the “ghost ship” Ulua and in the current cold weather had stayed below deck, but just as the vessel was putting out from the quay, the Jew passengers came swarming up from steerage like ants from an anthill, and it became clear just how overcrowded the ship was. As the Ulua swung its stern toward the hundreds of Trelleborg residents on the quay, the emigrants started singing a song of farewell, which could still be heard as the Ulua passed the outer section of the middle bridge.

The ship’s official destination is South America, but after a violent storm in the Bay of Biscay and emergency repairs in an Algerian port, the Ulua puts in at an unguarded beach outside Taranto in southern Italy and under cover of darkness takes seven hundred more Jewish survivors on board. With over 1,350 passengers crowded above and below deck, the ship approaches Palestine on February 27, 1947, level with Haifa. There she’s sighted by British reconnaissance aircraft, and two British minesweepers attempt to force her to stop. The Ulua responds by hoisting a “Jewish” flag and making for the coast at full speed. Along the sides of the ship, passengers push out wooden beams and sit in the lifeboats to obstruct boarding. Two British naval officers and ten seamen nonetheless succeed in boarding by the stern, but the swell in the wake of the ship sweeps their boat away, and when their tear gas runs out, they’re overpowered by the passengers and forced to jump overboard. At the next attempt, twenty-seven soldiers get themselves aboard and fire warning shots over the passengers’ heads while the Ulua steams toward the coast at twelve knots, reaching land just south of Haifa with the British soldiers still literally clinging on and within sight of a British army base at the foot of Mount Carmel. Nine passengers manage to swim ashore and get away; the rest are taken to Haifa and then transferred to a British internment camp on Cyprus.

Thus ended the journey onward for 650 individuals, some of whom might well have had their pictures taken on sunny jetties and rocky shores in the land of the vast forests, momentarily thinking they were in paradise, but to whom the idea of staying on had remained alien, perhaps even frightening. None of them could possibly have been unaware of the risks of such a voyage. The illegal conveyance of Jewish survivors to Palestine on defective, undersized, and overloaded ships was a high-risk enterprise that could end well or in disaster, or in a British internment camp on Cyprus, or sometimes in a British internment camp in Germany.

Yes, this must not be forgotten, the British had the gall to do even that. In the summer of 1947, four thousand Jewish survivors of the much mythologized Exodus were taken to a camp in Poppendorf, just outside Lübeck, after having come within sight of the coast of Palestine. Nobody could be unaware of the fact that this was how the journey onward could end. The picture of Jewish survivors being taken back to a camp in Germany was published the world over, even on the front page of Stockholms Läns och Södertälje Tidning on September 13, 1947.